Missouri Books

This book is court regulated , stories about the famous prision in Washington state. If you can get it , get it quick !!!

If you have any interest in Depression-era art, this is a must read. Frank Long's writing style flows smoothly and makes for an absorbing and entertaining experience. Full of humerous anecdotes, this book evokes the period eloquently.
The author is my father (deceased, 1999), but I would have said all these things even if I had no relation to him.

While David McCullough's more recent biography of Harry Truman has received widespread recent attention, Robert J. Donovan's earlier biography published in 1977 has much to recommend it. Whereas McCullough's extensive volume covers Truman's entire life, Donovan zeroes in on the pivotal period of a pivotal presidency. Donovan begins as Truman takes over the awesome responsibility of the presidency after Franklin D. Roosevelt's death. Donovan covers in perceptive detail Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan as a means of ending World War Two. Donovan follows the war to its conclusion, and also focuses carefully on the exciting 1948 presidential campaign, when Truman scored one of the greatest upsets in American political history by defeating heavily favored Republican nominee Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York.

Donovan turns an astute eye as well on Truman's great foreign policy accomplishments of the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, and the creation of NATO. As a Middle East historian, I was benefitted by his thorough presentation of the controversy leading up to the granting of recognition to the new nation of Israel, and how Truman's decision was crafted.

I would urge that any dedicated Truman scholar should read both the McCullough and Donovan volumes. McCullough covers a wider perspective, while Donovan, on the other hand, gives broader coverage to the pivotal foreign policy events from 1945 to 1948, as well as Truman's sensational upset victory over Dewey.

One of the best books I have read in a long time. If you are interested in the history of the Western American Frontier this is a great book to read. I am not going to go in vast detail about this book but it is about a river boat captain named Grant Marsh, one of the greatest riverboat pilots of all time.

"A Consuming Faith" is an important study of the ideology of the Social Gospel movement present among American Christians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Susan Curtis argues that the Social Gospel provided a necessary linkage between the Protestant-Victorian construct of society of the nineteenth century and the more secular consumer culture that emerged following World War I. Most Social Gospel reformers of the 1890s shared middle-class origins and a concern for the underside of America civilization. They have been portrayed, usually accurately, as a generation of Christian reformers who gave up their middle-class comforts to enter a world of squalor and hopelessness to help others. They ministered in ways that were fundamental to an urban underclass.

Curtis confesses in her preface that she was skeptical of the "do-gooder" image of those involved in the Social Gospel movement. Not surprisingly, therefore, she found good reason for skepticism. "For these American Protestants, responsible for acts of courage and kindness in the name of social justice," she wrote, "were also men and women bedeviled by private anxieties that impelled them into the arena of reform" (p. xi).

Carrying farther the well-established theories of status anxiety developed for progressive reformers of the same era by George D. Mowry and Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Curtis argued that they not only honestly wanted to accomplish good in the world but also desired to find meaning in a world undergoing rapid and sustained change in response to forces collectively identified as modernity. According to Curtis a range of motivations propelled the Social Gospelers and their activities; some overt and others subconscious, some lofty and others more base.

The Social Gospel, Curtis suggested, emerged in response to the dislocations of the industrial revolution in the late nineteenth century, including large-scale immigration and rapid and sustained urbanization. In its early expression the Social Gospel brought to the fore a sustained critique of industrial capitalist society and helped to displace the traditional American Christian concern for afterlife and eternity with an emphasis on the welfare of humanity in the here and now.

For Social Gospelers the Kingdom of God was very much of this world and not the next. It was something of a utopian vision that represented a spiritual condition where righteousness and justness are partners with goodwill and charity. The result would be what Washington Gladden, one of the reformers profiled here, defined as "social salvation." To accomplish it Social Gospel advocates organized cooperative ventures, undertook political activism, and engaged in a variety of reform efforts with specific goals. The heart of Curtis' interesting and convincing thesis is that some of the elements of the Social Gospel's ideology, as well as its members' desires, sought a place not in opposition to industrialism and modern society but in concert with it. Bound up in a dramatic cultural transformation as the older Protestant- informed Victorian order gave way to a modern, secular American society after World War I, the Social Gospel moved more in parallel rather than in apposition with these trends. By the 1920s, Curtis concluded, the adherents to the Social Gospel's ideas and actions made it easier for Protestant Americans to embrace a secular culture in which Protestantism was not prominently featured. They contributed to an American culture that validated abundance, consumption, and self-realization. Social Gospelers, reformers though they were, created not a critique of modern capitalism, but rather a consuming faith in the material abundance it promised (p. 278).

The Social Gospelers, therefore, not only accomplished positive social ends on a broad front but also established an intellectual rationalization for modernity that allowed contentment with the world. Curtis demonstrates this thesis through a series of biographical portraits of fifteen Americans involved in a variety of Social Gospel activities. In subtle ways these individuals came to embrace modernity and the secular social system that emerged in the 1920s.

There is much to praise and little to criticize in "A Consuming Faith." Susan Curtis argues her case well, and offers a convincing thesis explaining certain aspects of the paradigm shift that took place in American society between the 1890s and the 1920s. The most important caution I would offer, of course, relates to how far the intellectual leaders of any group reflected the opinions of the rank and file. Howard Zinn's warning is appropriate in this instance: "There is an underside to every Age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged. We learn...about the thinking of an age from its intellectual elite" (Howard Zinn, "The Politics of History" (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 102). Can a series of fifteen elites accurately define the ideological origins and development of such an amorphous movement as the Social Gospel? That question may be unanswerable, certainly it would require some very detailed and imaginative historical research to arrive at a satisfactory answer. Having raised this question, I should add that this is not a major flaw of A Consuminq Faith. I would suggest, however, that readers bear the question in mind when considering the book.

"A Consuming Faith" is an important discussion of a significant reform effort that helped shape modern American society. It is one of several refreshing books to appear recently on the development of American religion. It should be of use to anyone interested in the development of American religion and culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. As a sophisticated analysis of several historical trends focused through the lens of the Social Gospel, it is at once religious, social, and intellectual history and probably some other types of history yet unnamed. Those seeking staid history with emphasis on the minutiae of organizations and denominations will be disappointed. Those readers pondering broader vistas, however, will be rewarded by considering Curtis' work.

If you are a gardener, are interested in Native American culture, and especially if you are both, you may value this as highly as I do. Through interviews with surviving women who remembered the details of their tribes' agricultural methods, and the way of life/religion that went with them, the authors have made an important contribution in an area that was undervalued at the time (the early 1900's). But thank goodness they had the foresight to put this information to paper. The book describes tools, varieties, planting methods, and agricultural customs of the Upper Missouri tribes. Thanks to the authors' preservation work, and the work of others, some of the varieties mentioned can still be found. If you are interested, google up the Seed Saver's Exchange in Iowa, and add a new dimension to your gardening.

If you fish, or just wonder the waterways of MO, this book is a wonder. Combine it with the "Fishes of Missouri" and you will find out more about the animals below the waters surface then you would have found out in a lifetime. Unlike most academic style taxonimic works, Mr. Pfliegers books are interesting reads unto themselves, with easy to navigate identification guides, deatils on were animals have been found, and interesting facts about each. They are worth finding and using! I referenced it in my own work.

Although I have owned this book for some time, I still find myself coming back to its cornucopia of sometimes-rare photographs of Springfield. In a city that preserves little of its history, CROSSROADS gives the reader glimpses into the past glories of Springfield. I would recommend this book to anyone who is trying to learn more about Springfield, or just treasures the historical lifeblood of the town.

I live in Missouri, and it was our Department of Conservation that had this book by Cy Littlebee (one of the conservationists) published. If you know a hunter or fisher, this is the cookbook to give.
The book has tons of recipes, some by Cy, many submitted by others from around the state, and very few without a bit of Cy's commentary. There are recipes for every kind of fish or game animal or bird you can immagine, every technique (from gourmet to tacking you fish to a bit of driftwood when down by the river), and every taste. The recipes are tried and true, passed down for generations, and while I'll skip some on principle (I'll agree with Cy and let someone else tell me how the book's one recipe for skunk turns outs), many are so delicious you have to try them again and again.
The only complaint I might have with this book is that there are no pictures with the recipes. But the down-home way they are all written, and the conversational way Cy describes them, you don't really miss it.
I recomend this book to anyone who hunts or fishes, lives with anyone or hunts or fishes, or even knows anyone who hunts or fishes. The recipes won't steer you wrong, and you will find so many more ways of preparing your game than you ever thought possible.

To describe Sklenicka's book, I am going to quote from a review of it by the late Mark Spilka, who was one of the finest critics of the novel in the late 20th century: "The whole unsettled question of Lawrence's relation to children, and of his literary uses of his own childhhod experiences, is taken up handsomely by Carol Sklenicka in her breakthrough study . . . .[She] has given us the first important study of the thematic value of those years for the fictional treatment of children, and for his lifelong fascination with childhood."

Anyone who thinks of Lawrence as a now-obsolete proponent of free sexual expression should take a look at this readable scholarly study. Sklenicka shows that Lawrence had real insight into the nature of children and parenthood. Especially interesting is her idea that Lawrence (in 1920!) was a proponent of greater involvement by fathers in the raising of their children.